The Following
Much as Marle unwittingly follows Crono to the telepod demonstration which sucks her into the middle ages, you can now follow me on Twitter! Simply attach your account to mine in the manner of your choosing, and you’ll receive updates on my latest posts, gaming accomplishments, and other sundry activities such as previews of my movie reviews. I feel this is a good alternative to posting directly on Mammon every time I have a fresh observation about SMB3 that only lasts a matter of sentences before sputtering out.
One RPG which features a distinct lack of following amongst the player-character party (seamless segue: 1,000 points!) is the original Final Fantasy. I consistently forget how steep the learning curve is in that game, a point driven home by the eventual routine that any given party configuration will fall into. The first time I ever beat the game, I took two fighters, a white mage, and a black mage — a decent party for the novice player, if a little expensive to keep equipped with the latest shiny pointy things. They pushed through Corneria and Pravoka, struggled a bit with the Marsh Cave and Astos, then started to find their footing around Melmond.
I would undertake my second trek with the 8-Bit Theater party: a fighter, thief, red mage, and black mage. Again, they ran into trouble at the Marsh Cave, but things were going swimmingly by the time they revived the Earth Orb.
Now on what I believe could be my third World Champion title run, I’m using a black belt, a thief, and white and black mages, and sure enough, there were difficulties with the chtonic wizards in that accursed dungeon of swampery. But we have retrieved the mystic KEY, and now the mummies behind the locked door in the Dark Elf’s old haunt are ripe for the picking. There’s truly something special about a group of guaranteed enemies which you can consistently wipe out with FIR2 or HRM2 for upwards of 300 exp. and 1,500 G per fight. Only a few other moments in the game — the class change and retrieving the adamantium for the dwarf smithy come to mind — feature such a sweeping change in your party’s power dynamic.
The balance of this change comes not from a linear story progression, but from the game’s own bestiary. At several points, primarily when you earn a new mode of transportation, multiple new areas will open for you at once. But traveling to the wrong area before you’re prepared will see you shredded and humiliated for your hubris. This was a common method of restraining adventurers at the time: Dragon Warrior, where you could walk anywhere you wished provided you could kill the Wyverns on the other side of the bridge, and Mother, which was intended to be made even more strict with its North American release by adding difficult foes to the train tunnels, also featured the risk-reward system, where gambling on clearing a more difficult area could result in a greater prize to turn relatively easier tasks into abject pushovers. In both of my previous games, I went to the Ice Cave prior to Gurgu Volcano as soon as I received the canoe in order to retrieve the Floater for the airship, amid cusses and seething anger at the frost dragons. (My very first game was wrecked when, in a fit of rage at having been XXXX’ed out of existence by the Eye, I smacked my NES and it erased my save file.) Compare this to the modern RPG, in which the majority of challenge-easing advantages are sidequests, because making too many areas accessible would ruin the storyline progression.
Of course, word on the street is that the really modern games like Fable are taking this into account, creating more vibrant worlds where you can do more of what you like without bucking the narrative. But I wouldn’t know; I prefer to know where gaming has been, rather than where it’s going. I prefer to follow paths, not people.
Tags: Final Fantasy